Language

Psalm 42, verses 1-8 Philip Sidney                                         Miles Coverdale Miles Coverdale’s translation of the psalms was among the first fruit of Henry VIII’s ambivalent reformation. The religion of Henry’s England was essentially Catholicism without the Pope; but he did permit the translation of scripture into English, and in 1535 Coverdale printed the first full English bible. His Psalms were later included in the Book of Common Prayer and are still used in Anglican services today. Philip Sidney’s translations of the psalms were written about fifty years later. They were unprinted and incomplete when he died in 1586. These two translations of the opening of Psalm 42 differ in many ways. These

John Ashbery is recognized as one of the most eminent American poets of the twentieth-century. He also been called America’s greatest living poet today. Ashbery published his first book of poems Some Trees in 1956; it earned him the Yale Younger Poets Prize: a competition that was judged by W.H. Auden at the time. He has picked up many literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. At 85, he shows no signs of putting down his pen. He has recently published a collection of poems entitled Quick Question. Although the majority of critics have recognized his talent, many

Every so often a writer renovates a whole literary landscape from underneath. Armed to the teeth with slang and learning, Saul Bellow reinvented American prose with The Adventures of Augie March in 1953, and it took thirty years for a Martin Amis, a disciple of Bellow, to bring English up to date with Money. But then the language became saturated with people who wanted to sound like Amis and we needed writers from the Commonwealth to infuse English with their idioms to make it new again. (Or was this the other way around?) New prose Messiahs are often announced but rarely stick around. Junot Diaz might well be the real

Fancy a walk into London’s past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can’t promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn’t an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a

Which words in current use would you ban? Lake Superior State University answers this question each year, with its famous ‘List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’. Words are recommended by members of the English speaking world, and then selected by the university. Top of the list is ‘fiscal cliff’: the catchall phrase for the various political (and cultural) difficulties that have arisen from America’s fiscal and economic crises. Opinion is split on which of ‘fiscal’ or ‘cliff’ is the greater offence. Other irate correspondents object to the vague metaphor: is America trying to scale the cliff or trying not to

From ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many

The English language is, as English would have it, an odd duck.  Its nuances are capricious — to the non-native, maliciously so — but its lyricism widely praised. My preoccupation with language possibly stems from my first profession, that of a stage actress (throughout the course of this esteemed career, I made literally hundreds of dollars). Trained to mimic accents from public school Brit to Dixieland Southern belle, I was continually delighted by regionalisms. When I ceased auditioning and commenced scribbling, my fascination with ripe local slang never left me. When I decided to pen the tale of day one, cop one of the New York City Police Department, I

Walk into a coffee shop on any high street today and you’re confronted by an amazing array of caffeine-connected choices: flat white, red eye and doppio to name a few. We’ve become coffee connoisseurs with our own particular preferences for skinny or full fat, dry or wet. Yet the words we use to describe our favourite latte or cappuccino are fairly recent. We’ve only started to use them in the last five years or so as we’ve embraced the coffee culture of Australia and New Zealand (flat white), New York (red eye) and Italy (doppio). New trends demand new words and these global linguistic influences have quickly percolated into our

When you begin in subediting – the odd little craft of preparing other people’s journalism for publication – certain things, or pairs of things, are drummed into you. St James’ Park is where Newcastle United play; St James’s Park is where the band of the Grenadier Guards play. Lloyds is the bank; Lloyd’s is the insurance market. Pontin’s has an apostrophe; Butlins doesn’t. Unfortunately for subeditors, times change. St James’ Park is now the Sports Direct Arena, although a similar deal has yet to be done for St James’s Park. Lloyds has acquired TSB and been acquired, in turn, by the government. Pontins has emerged from financial difficulties, but it

Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor. His first collection of short stories ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’ was published in the United States in 1973. It was another nine years before his first novel ‘The Busconductor Hines appeared. Kelman has received several prizes for his fiction including: the Cheltenham Prize for Greyhound for Breakfast and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ‘A Disaffection’. His fourth novel, ‘How Late it Was, How Late’, landed him the Booker Prize in 1994, amid a storm of controversy. To date he has published eight collections of short stories, eight novels,

An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars: (John Murray, £17.99) is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars: (John Murray, £17.99) is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and

Gladstone found something very strange indeed in Homer, but the world was treating the future prime minister warily when he published his findings. It was 1858, the year he sailed off to the Ionian Islands as ruling commissioner, to address his puzzled Italian-speaking subjects in classical Greek. But even if Gladstone really was mad, as his political opponents said, he was undeniably right in noting that Homer’s use of colour was deeply odd. It wasn’t just the ‘wine-dark sea’. That epithet oinops, ‘wine-looking’ (the version ‘wine-dark’ came from Andrew Lang’s later translation) was applied both to the sea and to oxen, and it was accompanied by other colours just as